Performative Ontology of Gender

Gender science typically conceives of gender in primarily epistemological terms and so we need consider the genders of the body in ontological terms as well.

Ontological investigations into the question of gender typically takes its starting point in presumed but not actual anatomical dualities in the socially constructed genders of the body. This is so since humans constitute gendered spectrums both anatomically and behaviorally with intersexed people and transgender people in the middle as part of these two spectrums of differentiation in semiotic markers.

If however we take the respective middle parts of the spectrums as the starting points may we gain a very different ontological understanding of the genders of the body.

Transgender people experience a socially constructed asymmetry between body and genders and primarily so because transgender people suffer misgendering in society. When a transgender person points out having been misgendered ever since early age then what does s/he actually say in ontological terms? Does she refer to an embodied gendered essence or does s/he simply refer to coincidental social construction? Is a person transgender by destiny from birth and/or does a person become transgender by mere coincidence in social conditioning? When someone says “I am transgender”, does this has any meaning beyond identity politics and the performativity of gender?

It has been known in feminism at least since Simone de Beauvoir that gendered anatomy is socially constructed and Judith Butler as famous for describing the performativity of gender would no doubt concur.

Genders could be described as multiple layers as socially enveloping our bodies in that we all have distinctly different genders for different social situations and different details of our socially constructed bodies:

Gender of course is anything but binary and so being transgender is simply intense discomfort with coercively assigned binary gender. In using traditional cultural terminology could this thus be referred to as “Soul gender” as to be added to the above list. What traditional discourses described as “the soul” is simply the physical projection of personhood and so gender as expression of the “soul” is more expressive of personhood than any other such shibboleth such as age, color, ethnicity etc.

Gender thus is intrinsic expression of personhood and so the real question is therefore how one may appropriately express personhood by means of deploying the exterior to express the idiosyncratic interior. Gender hence is contrary to what is presumed not about the body but about the body expressing idiosyncratic personhood. Personhoods are extremely diverse as can indeed be measured across many psychometric spectra as certainly not limited to human Animals. But can gender be psychometrically measured? Its socially constructed expression can certainly become statistically quantified and there is certainly great individual gendered psychometric differentiation across the gendered spectrum but is this really a psychometric question or to put it differently what kind of question or rather riddle is gender actually? This is so as as individual gendered expressions are expressive of individual personhood to highly varying degrees. Gender expression may largely be a social mask yet it may also be profound expression, indeed projection of idiosyncratic personhood.

The real question hence is how successful individual gender expressions are in communicating/conveying individual personhood by means of social behaviors and the socially constructed appearance of the body. We need thus all be educated, trained and assisted in appropriately expressing individual personhood through bodily expression; including primping, body/facial language and movements of the tongue.

The standard Eurocentric body has been socially constructed as a dichotomous ideological hegemony where human bodies were hermeneutically ideologically interpreted in ways artificially bisecting this diverse human spectrum in anatomy. Need there be an imaginary standard human body for textbooks? If so should it be a racially/agewise/functionally indeterminable intersexed body as performatively irreducible to binary gender by observation alone.